Masterpost of Farming Simulation Games that aren't HM/SoS/RF

[JustABeautifulGuy]

Wasn't really looking forward to Fields of Mistria but I just played the demo and I loved it as well. The game seems to have a lot of potential. It does have very similar mechanics to SDV so that's a huge audience that can easily jump on to try this game. Weirdly, I also didn't really like SDV but I'm finding myself enjoy a game that's so similar to it. I adore the 90s anime artstyle, it's definitely the most charming aspect of this game and I assume that's why I seem to prefer this over SDV as well. I was very excited when I saw it was releasing this August but then the early access tag appeared and ruined my mood I just hate playing games that are not finished, I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer to fully experience this game. Meanwhile, I'll fill up my time completing other recent farm sims and games. (I'll finally complete all the shrines in my Tears of the Kingdom copy...)

On topic of other farm sims, Sunnyside is finally releasing in just 3 days! I wasn't really that excited about this game but the demo sold me completely. I still do wish they did something else with the art style but the gameplay was good enough to push me to give this game a proper try. They actually managed to modernize the classic farm sim formula as they promised to but I hope this realistic gameplay mechanism doesn't get tiring real soon. Why I say that is because I'm concerned about the aspect that I'm most excited yet at the same time worried about: the romance. The characters seem lovely and the dialogues seem really rich but the fact you can get locked out of certain options because of your gender identity does scare me. I do appreciate the realistic approach but I'm afraid I'll be wasting my time trying to romance someone who wouldn't see me in the same light. I like that this allowed them to make the experience more personalized but sometimes I really just want to escape the real world romantic hardships to enjoy some easy light romance in video games. (Don't think I'm ready to take another rejection especially after going through a recent break up lol)

[K8sMum]

SDV never really clicked with me but I am now a bit obsessed with Fields of Mistria. I waited til I was sure I could play with the pro controller as I really don't care for using the keyboard in games.

FoM just looks so good and the characters are interesting. It plays well for an early access game, which I rarely play. I keep going with the attitude of 'ok, just one more day' then 3 hours have passed. I'm a slow player and taking my time but it doesn't seem to matter with this one. I like the lack of stress.

[Bluie]

Guys, I'm legitimately sorry that I do not update this thread any more, or at least as much as I should. When I started it, there wasn't nearly as big as a farming game boom as their is now. I can barely blink these days without there being four more farming sims or games with included farming manifesting. It's impossible to keep up with, especially with my schedule. I get two days off a week, once of which is usually taken up by responsibilities, and whatever time I have left is dedicated to hobbies. Updating this list takes literal hours now and I just don't have it in me any more. On random days I might get a burst of motivation and get it done, but those are very, very rare.

Definitely keep using the thread to discuss and bring up new games, I just can't promise anything on my side of things.

[Kikki]

Guys, I'm legitimately sorry that I do not update this thread any more, or at least as much as I should. When I started it, there wasn't nearly as big as a farming game boom as their is now. I can barely blink these days without there being four more farming sims or games with included farming manifesting. It's impossible to keep up with, especially with my schedule. I get two days off a week, once of which is usually taken up by responsibilities, and whatever time I have left is dedicated to hobbies. Updating this list takes literal hours now and I just don't have it in me any more. On random days I might get a burst of motivation and get it done, but those are very, very rare.

Definitely keep using the thread to discuss and bring up new games, I just can't promise anything on my side of things.

No, no, Bluie. It's unbelievable that you've kept it up so long. DON'T use up your free time on this when you have so little of it! Thank you for the thread; it's up to all of us now, if we want to keep contributing...we can make our own lists and post them here.

[Shan O 123]

For sure. I do look through everything

[-Frey-]

Hey there, I've risen again and omg everyone is doing such a great job! Thanks to every one of you! You're making my day brighter everytime I visit this forum again.

There are so many 'neighbourvania'-games right now and if you're on a budget, you almost need a full research on a game before you finally try to pick one up.

As for me, I don't want to spoil myself too much.
I did that with Stardew Valley and thus I didn't enjoy it as far as I might've. Therefore I didn't enjoy Sun Haven as much, because there where way too many similarities to Stardew that didn't justify the price, if you've already played Stardew, imo.
Don't get me wrong, they're great games and I had alot of fun, but it's nothing new or "innovative".
Coral Island f.e. has the same concept, but they have the addition of merpeople, an animal shelter etc. which could be a reason why to buy.

Right now, I'm having a lot of fun with My Time At Sandrock. Even though I had my doubts (graphics and so on), but I really like the Borderlands-vibe, the whole world and it's characters ... but wait is that you, Vaughn? Damn I only saw that similarity as I'm writing this.

I needed a few days trying to decide which game to buy and I chose Sandrock. (btw I'm playing it on my switch lite and the graphics are good!) During my "research" I watched some old reviews from 2023 and you can't compare the graphics from back then to now. (because patches)
So all I'm saying is, if you want to play My Time At Sandrock and the switch's graphic is your main concern, try to look at the date of the video or blog post and then make your decision.

The last 'farming'-games that I played (that included romance) were Plum Grove and Harvestella.

I'm currently waiting for Chocolatier and Grave Seasons.

[Terranigma Freak]

I just discovered this. Don't know if it's been posted and the list is too big to search, but here it is anyway.

[JustABeautifulGuy]

I was just checking up on this game myself. It looks cute but seems like the early impressions aren't good at all. Players are outright suggesting to avoid this game due to how unfinished and non-functional the game is.

I feel like I'm seeing an uprising trend of unfinished mediocre farm sim games catering to cozy gamers coming out for a quick buck. It's sad how I'm seeing so many players being victims of these exploitative traps all because the game looks up their alley visually. Oriental Valley, A New Leaf Memories and now this. Heck, A New Leaf Memories got like a whopping 100K USD in Kickstarter funding for the game and dev team to be such a mess!

All I can do is be hopeful that people don't fall for such games and be left with a distaste for this genre but I guess it's inevitable.

[Bluie]

Orange Season is on the list... somewhere. I recognize it. It was in EA for years and I guess they just finally threw in the towel and released it.

[Kikki]

$100,000 is chump change in game development. It's a lot for a single developer who is genuinely making the game entirely themselves, but add even one person and instantly your costs at least double, just in necessary wages/cost of living for the time spent on development. If you add someone doing music or still art or etc, each of those has a big price tag.

The Evershine Kickstarter has earned over $2 million and people think they're rich now, but Sandrock cost $12 million to make. Evershine will probably cost even MORE than $12 million. Little pixel games have lower costs, but even for them, $100,000.00 isn't much.

~

I remember Orange Season, too, from years ago. It's only newly released?

~

No list is too long to search, as long as you use the 'Find' function.

All you have to do is open the spoiler tag and press Control F, then type in what you're looking for. Just 'orange' in this case would do. All incidences of the word 'orange' will then be highlighted. You can even press 'enter' and it will take you directly to the first incidence of the word orange. Press enter again, and it will take you to the second incidence. Press enter a third time, and it will take you to the third incidence.

It's best to choose the most uncommon word in whatever you are searching. 'Orange' isn't likely to appear in all that many game titles, but choosing to search 'Orange Season' rather than just 'orange' would probably reduce the number of incidences even more.

Now if a game were called just 'The', or 'A' or similar, then it really would be very difficult to search, even with the Find function.

If the word/s you want to find are inside a spoiler cut, the spoiler must be open. 'Find' will not locate anything that is hidden inside a closed spoiler tag.

[Kikki]

Fields of Mistria is seeing extraordinary levels of success. It's only been in EA for about 3 months and it's going to get its first major update on November 18th, and it's got over ten thousand reviews with an 'overwhelmingly positive' balance. That's nearly unheard of. I can't even believe how popular it is, and the way reviewers gush. It's not often that you see so many agreeing that a game in the same genre might be better than Stardew, or at least just as good in a different way.

It wasn't on my radar at all tbh, as I don't like pixel graphics and the characters look very...I don't know. Sailor Moon-ish, except less anime? But with this level of praise, maybe I'll nudge it up into my visible range.

Also, it's not made as big a splash as FoM, but Go Go Town! is surprisingly popular, though I'm not 100% sure you can farm; it's more of a cute town/city-builder and management game (I think you can set villagers to mining and farming but I don't think YOU can farm. Not sure.) I'm a little surprised it's doing as well as it is so quickly. Prideful Sloth has experience (Yonder (CCC) and Grow (SotE) are by them), but this one seems to be turning out to be the most polished from such an early stage. They've added their Dinkum x Go Go Town! crossover update now, too.

It's nice to see some new indies (that are more genuinely indies, unlike the My Time series which is a professional studio with a BIG roster of employees and a $12 million budget on the last game...how do they call themselves indie anymore??) busting some slick moves on the scene right now. I've seen some others that seem like they're really going to take off, too.

[JustABeautifulGuy]

Fields of Mistria sure is getting a lot of buzz. I keep seeing lots of viral posts of it on my social media apps.

The art style seems quite bland the more I see the footage of the game online. It doesn't really have much going on. There are very few assets and they all are quite simple looking. It's definitely a stylistic choice but I feel Stardew Valley's pixel art feels far more lively and looks much better. Both the games are on the opposite ends for me graphically. I like Stardew Valley's overworld pixel art but totally hate the portaits pixel art whereas I have a complete opposite opinion for Fields of Mistria: I like the portrait pixel art but dislike the overworld pixel art.

Bunch of discourse videos regarding FoM have popped on Youtube as well. Before, it was us Bokumono fans who had complex feelings at the time that a new game completely stole the attention using the formula from our beloved series... now it's Stardew Valley fans who are starting to feel bitter with Fields of Mistria racking up success from SDV's formula. I guess the cycle goes on. Not that I think Stardew Valley's success will ever be replicated for quite a while (or ever...) so all the discourse feels quite premature and ungrounded for now.

I was checking its stats on SteamDB and it's actually doing quite well. Its average concurrent player count is comparatively quite close or higher than the most recent non-SDV popular games (like Sandrock and Coral Island to name a few).

I got curious and decided to even check further on other games. My biggest surprise was how quick Stardew Valley skyrocketted to its success. It reached a peak of a whopping 60K players concurrent players just a month after its release! I had always assumed that its success happened much much later. I guess I was too pre-occupied with Trio of Towns to notice what was happening around in the scene back then.

I also decided to check on stats for RF/SoS on Steam as well and they were expectedly low. I know SoS gets a huge majority of their numbers from Nintendo consoles but I do wonder if their numbers on Steam will get better eventually.

[fizzly]

I know SoS gets a huge majority of their numbers from Nintendo consoles but I do wonder if their numbers on Steam will get better eventually.

I think they slept over their chance a bit by not releasing any HM/SoS games for PC for such a long period. Stadew Valley set a new bar in farming-sim games and fullfilled that gap. Converting old titles to PC after 10 years, even though players asked for it much earlier, well, it's not a path to a success if you ask me.

[JustABeautifulGuy]

I think they slept over their chance a bit by not releasing any HM/SoS games for PC for such a long period. Stadew Valley set a new bar in farming-sim games and fullfilled that gap. Converting old titles to PC after 10 years, even though players asked for it much earlier, well, it's not a path to a success if you ask me.

Agreed, I think it's simply too late now to get on with the PC audience. Plus, I guess the SoS games available that are currently available on Steam couldn't manage to have longetivity in any possible way. FoMT is a remake of a very old popular game which genuinely feels a little barebone now in the modern farm sim landscape; hence why it had a strong start since people were buying for its recognition but dipped quite fast since they'd run out of engaging content quite fast. Pioneers of Olive Town stood on its own with no familarity at all with the casual playerbase and the end result was... ~70% decrease in sales according to the owner estimations on SteamDB. A Wonderful Life remake did a little better than PoOT on Steam once again thanks to people being familar with the game but just like with FoMT, its frontloaded success didn't last long as expected.

Marvelous definitely is a long way to catch up with its farm sim competitors on the Steam because it means they'd need to convince an entirely new audience to try out their games since the OG fandom will remain situated on the Nintendo consoles. I guess to the audience on Steam, Story of Seasons is just another regular farm sim that really doesn't stand out. I don't think it'll stand any chance against other more fancy and grander appearing options like My Time At Evershine until Marvelous actually puts out a very very good game. It's much tougher now than it would've been before.

I do wonder how Trio of Towns would've performed if it released on Steam close to its release back then. It was the last really good Bokumono game so I'm sure it would've gotten some traction for its quality. There wasn't much competition back then either. I think it'd do pretty well numbers (about 500K-1M copies on Steam).

[Kikki]

Trio of Towns was too low quality for PC, imo. I do mean graphics, though, not gameplay quality. A game that small and grainy on a PC in 2017? I don't think so. It was entirely built for the 3DS and that itsy bitsy screen. They'd have had to do a different version, if they wanted to put it on PC. The Switch games, on the other hand, were built from the ground up to look good on a large screen, so they were more suitable for PC, at least graphically.

They could still break into PC if they WANTED to make that an important market, but they won't. Steam is a nickel-and-dime operation. People expect much lower prices and frequent, steep sale prices as well.

It's not really profitable for them to do what they would have to, to be sought-after on Steam. Though in a way, it's too bad, because the new market of farming sim players would probably be more accepting of games like Olive Town than many of us older players. It stepped too far away from the core mechanics to feel good to many of us. And on top of that, it was a major style shift, too, and people always react badly to a major style shift. A major graphic quality shift is accepted better, but big style shifts are always treated rather hotly.

I do think they'll continue to release on PC, but unless they take lessons from Trio (and maybe a few other past games), I don't think they're ever going to be a major player on Steam. Maybe not even if they do. It's just not their market and there's way too much competition now, to boot.

I don't want to play SoS on PC anyway, personally. In fact, I really miss the 3DS specifically. It was SO nice to hold, much more comfortable than the Switch, even though I put a comfort grip on my Switch if I'm playing handheld. The 3DS was the best console ever to play all cozied up in bed.